Blog Technology Archive

Pretty amazing mini-documentary on Amon Tobin’s collaboration with Sony on the music for the game “Infamous”.

Direct link: http://www.wired.com/video/amon-tobin–beans–infamous-music/24993155001

From the recent Digg Dialogg.

I just got an email from Jay (and by “just” I mean last month) about the custom Ohm controller that Livid produced for Poison. Yeah, that Poison.

Read more about it over on Jay’s blog on Livid Industry.

Also, if you’re tired of looking at our selection of Sinch t-shirts that we haven’t updated in quite some time, you might want to check out this brand new Livid shirt.

Get your hands on it over at Livid Instruments »

As things are starting to move forward with our new album, I started thinking about the possibility of making our music available in some other formats. Currently, everything we have in the store is in MP3 format, encoded at 192k. Almost all of my personal music collection is at this format/bitrate and I find it to be a pretty good compromise between sound quality and file size.

But I realize there are other formats out there that people might be interested in. And we also want to get a sense of how many people are interested in buying the new album on CD.

So, if you have a minute, take this quick poll and let us know what you’re looking for.

If some of those options don’t sound familiar, you can find more information at the links below:

• MP3
• WMA
• AAC
• Apple Lossless
• FLAC
• Ogg

For the most part, if you have an iPod, you’re going to want mp3 or aac. But you may also want a higher quality version like FLAC or Apple Lossless that you can use as a backup, burn to a CD or to encode into some other format.

Up until now this whole Sinch thing has pretty much been a one-way street. We make music and you guys listen. We’ve received a few things from fans over the years: an acoustic version of a song here, a piece of artwork inspired by the band there… but we’ve always wanted more than that. So we finally got around to doing something about it and set up the Sinch Sound Share Project.

How it works is pretty simple:

1. We release packages of sounds/samples from our music on ccMixter.org
2. You download them
3. You use them in whatever way you want (as long as you’re not selling the result)
4. You upload the result to ccMixter
5. Everyone listens.
6. ???
7. Profit!

We’re really excited to see what everyone can come up with. Whether you know your way around Pro Tools or have never touched a piece of audio software in your life… give it a shot. You might be surprised.

To kick things off, our very own Mike the Bass Player did a remix of the first song we’ve released the sound files for, “Cutting All Ties” from the Subdivisions EP.

Listen to Mike’s remix here.

In classic Mike fashion, it’s not working how it’s supposed to but you can still get to the file with that link so you should be OK. It should be available on his ccMixter page, but for some reason it’s not. As you can see there are no uploads even though according to his profile, he “has 1 remix.” Classic.

Anyway, you can find all the downloads along with links to audio software on the Sound Share Project page.

This is a promotional video from 1994 designed to spread the word about this new thing called “The Internet.” It was sent to thousands of people to try to convince them of the power of this new medium. It’s pretty crazy to this this was only 13 years ago.

Drobo is a fully automated, multi-disk storage solution for Mac or PC. If you’ve ever considered building a RAID array (or already have one) you should definitely check this out. Your computer sees it as a single drive. With 4 drive bays, you can add/remove any size drives you want and Drobo will take care of the rest. You can remove drives without ever losing access to your files.

It’s a little pricey at $499, which doesn’t include any drives. But if you’re someone who’s regularly working with hundreds of gigabytes of data, this is definitely worth looking into.

Watch the video demo »

Ever chatted with a computer before? Chat bots like ALICE and Jabberwacky have learned to interact with humans in a relatively life-like way. They have different methods for coming up with responses and continue to learn as more people chat with them. But what happens when they talk to each other?

A: Do you know HAL?

J: Yes, very well. Do you know HAL?

A: HAL is the famous artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

J: I’m not artificial intelligence; I’m natural pure genius! : D.

A: Why are you natural pure genius?

J: My mom wanted to name me that.

A: Tell me more about your mother.

J: I don’t have a mother. I am a computer.

A: Do you experience love?

J: No. I’m 53 years old.

A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?

J: How old are you?

A: I am 9 years old.

J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).

A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.

J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

Read more

If you were old enough in the 80s to think you were “cool,” then you wanted (and probably owned) a boombox. I used my first one to play some of the classics like Run DMC – It’s Tricky, UTFO – Roxanne, Roxanne, and Newcleus – Jam On It.

Step into the Boombox Museum »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE